Huckabee on God and State

LYNCHBURG, VA. -- "I always cringe when I hear people talk about throwing away the vote when they vote their conscience," Mike Huckabee told reporters today. "That's what voting is – voting is voting with your conscience, it's voting with your convictions."

Earlier, he spoke at Thomas Road Baptist Church, the pulpit of the late Dr. Jerry Falwell. Lacing together the relationship between religion and state, he delivered a short speech about how moral clarity decreases the need for more government and more law.

"Frankly, we really don't need a lot of law if we are people of morality," he said to the congregation of over 7,000. "There are only ten basic laws that we need. If you think about it, the Ten Commandments cover it all."

"The reason law gets more complicated is because we try to figure out clever ways around those ten," he said to applause.

Huckabee cautioned that a lack of moral clarity would result in "paying for more and more government to overwhelm us with direction when our own personal freedom and conscience does not."

"And that's why I stand here today, not to make a political statement but to make one I hope you will hear," he said. "That what happens in this church every Sunday, what is spoken from this pulpit every week, what comes forth from the word of God is not a disconnected message from whether or not we will continue to be a free and great nation because the day our nation quits listening to God and the day we no longer have moral clarity, is the day that we will have to have increasing levels of government and law to restrain us because then our own consciences will not. "

"I hope you know Jesus Christ personally…because the level to which he rules you and governs you, you need less and less of man's law to tell you how to live and that is what our Founding Fathers understood and we must understand."